Monthly Archives: March 2012

A few days ago we posted about the old lamp being restored and placed once again in the Aft Cabin on Cambria. Here’s the link.

Now on Cambria’s own website, Matt Care in the Volunteers’ Views Blog has more information about the lamp. Project Manager, William Collard, has told him that the lamp came back to the Cambria Trust in 2009, having been in the care of one of Bob Roberts’s family for a number of years. The lamp had at some time been converted to electrics, and parts were missing. This is the story of how it was restored.

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Busy weekend in the barge world.

Cambria left dry dock at Faversham yesterday, and here’s Repertor already on the way to take her place in the dry dock.

Meanwhile today more work is done on Cambria, and here’s Tim Goldsack working on her new bowsprit.

At the other great home of barges, Maldon, the Quay saw Kitty getting attention. JP Lodge says “…lowering down, sanding and painting the topmast truck, preparing to rig out and heave up maybe next weekend.”

A nostalgic piece of Cambria’s history was hung back in place this afternoon. The Aft cabin lamp that can be seen in a picture that appears in Dick Durham’s ‘The Last Sailorman’ and the Maritime Trust Pamphlet about the Cambria has been restored by Project Manager William Collard. It was donated some years ago and William has sourced new wicks from Ebay of all places, along with a new shade from an antique shop in Shropshire and a lamp chimney from Weymouth. He had a hole that had been used to run electric flex welded up in the font to restore it to its original state and this afternoon it burned brightly once again in the cabin it first shone in many moons ago.

The Edith May Trading Company reports that the final weekend of the 2011/12 Tea Room will be the 26th-29th April. They will reopen regularly next October, but for those that cannot wait, there will be open days during the summer, including Rochester Sweeps Festival, where you can get a delicious cream tea on the barge in front of Rochester Castle.

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Excellent programme tonight. John Sergeant was very interested in all going on. Strange that his second visit was to Faversham, but no mention of boats of any sort, or that Cambria was restored there. The section on Cambria was lovely, and both Richard Titchener and Tim Goldsack came over well in their interviews. JS was very complimentary about the Cambria Trust and the quality of the restoration.

At the SSBR Committee meeting on Saturday, Roger Newlyn told us that Pudge would be back in the water on Monday, and then there would be about three weeks’ more work to be done on her. True to this, Roger has today sent us this picture of Pudge with the message, “Pudge after swapping places with Cambria in the Faversham dry dock yesterday”.

We wish Pudge and her team all the best for her completion and return to the fleet.

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John Sergeant has today started a series on BBC2, at 6.30pm, called Britain’s First Photo Album. JS is following in the footsteps of Francis Frith, the Victorian pioneer of photography. He takes some of the images and looks at how those places have changed over the years.

Today he started in London with Chelsea Pensioners and Covent Garden. Then he got to open Tower Bridge himself, and sb Gladys was seen passing through it downriver.

The trailer for tomorrow’s programme showed JS on board sb Cambria at Gravesend, which was filmed whilst she was based at St Andrew’s Wharf. Matt Care tells us she was skippered by Richard and crewed by Stretch and Tim G. He said JS and the film crew certainly enjoyed their day on board, and JS proved to be a brilliant, friendly and approachable bloke who took a good genuine interest in the project. He was even messing about at one point doing a De Caprio/Titanic in the bows.